The Wind That Shakes The Barley

A columnist for The Times recently compared Ken Loach with Hitler's favourite director, Leni Riefenstahl. That strikes me as harsh. Riefenstahl was far more visually talented.

Our trendiest Trotskyite's latest attempt to re-educate the masses has just picked up the Palme d'Or, the top award at the Cannes Film Festival. Loach admits to being surprised. I'm astounded.

The decision makes sense only if you see it either as a Life Achievement Award on the eve of Loach's 70th birthday, or as a political tribute to agit-prop that could be interpreted as an attack on American neocolonialist oppression in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yes, it's probably that.

Loach's latest film starts in 1920 with aggressive British soldiers terrorising and murdering innocent Irish villagers.

Later, we will see our lads torturing captives and burning pretty cottages to the ground. Bad guys, every one of ' em.

There can be little doubt that the British did commit atrocities in Ireland, and that the behaviour of the ill-disciplined Black and Tans did radicalise the locals.

But Loach gives us no clue as to why British forces were in Ireland. There's nothing about the Easter Rising of 1916, or the Irish willingness to collaborate with Germany during the Great War. The British are presented as an evil, occupying force, intent on overthrowing a democratically-elected government.

Loach might have been wise at least to countenance other viewpoints, as most good political films do.

To illustrate Loach's central theme that uncompromising socialism is the One True Way, he focuses on two brothers, both dedicated to fighting the British, but who find themselves on different sides once that battle is resolved with the founding of the Irish Free State in 1921.

It is a huge weakness of the picture that Loach's sympathies are so overwhelmingly on the side of the more cinematic brother: the handsome, high-cheekboned, dewy-eyed Cillian Murphy, who plays the movie in a near-beatific trance, as though he expects imminent martyrdom.

The other brother is meant to be a charismatic leader and action man, but he is played anonymously, and drearily, by Padraic Delaney. He isn't helped by the fact that Loach and his writer Paul Laverty have no sympathy for his more pragmatic, less socialistic approach to colonialism.

The principal faults of the film match the ones afflicting Loach's diatribe about the Spanish Civil War, Land And Freedom (1995).

Once again, his hero is an under-characterised innocent to whom things happen, and the other characters have little chance to develop — they are political mouthpieces rather than people.

In both films, the romantic interest is treated so perfunctorily that it fails to involve us.

Loach has no use for light and shade, no room for facts that don't fit his hardline Marxist dialectic.

He does not begin to address the sectarian dimension of the IRA's campaign in Cork. He refuses to acknowledge the fanaticism and brutality of the IRA. The film comes across as not merely melodramatic, but blinkered and monomaniacal.

Pictorially, it is among Loach's better works, well photographed in greens and browns by Barry Ackroyd. It doesn't look as rushed or under-budgeted as most of his work.

The sound isn't great, which isn't helped by the impenetrable accents of some of the cast but George Fenton's plaintive Celtic score serves the story well.

And there are traces of greatness. Though no Leni Riefenstahl, except in his willingness to defend the indefensible (in Ken's case, the IRA), Loach is, in many ways, an admirable film-maker.

He is not afraid to express his principles, however unpopular they may be. He can draw moving performances out of actors, especially those who are untrained.

He has humanity and kindness when he depicts ordinary working people, though none when he portrays the British authorities, for whom he shows boundless (and often justified) contempt.

Loach is at his best observing the minutiae of everyday life, often with wry amusement. I still treasure his direction of Brian Glover's over-enthusiastic football game in Kes.

The truest, as well as the most enjoyable, scene in his new movie is when he depicts an Irish messenger boy trying to deliver an important message to eager members of the IRA, only to discover after a rapid ransacking of his pockets that he has dropped it.

It's a cute, funny moment, but it also has that unmistakable feeling of truth — the kind of messy, quirky truth that doesn't usually make it on to movie screens.

But too much of Barley is in the same, sorry tradition as his infamous Hidden Agenda (1990) in the way it presents the British Army as the force of darkness, and the IRA as a cheery bunch of folk singers, democrats and humanitarians.